Hypothetically speaking, if someone is living in New York and they call 911, how does the call not go through a hospital in Los Angeles or other city from another state? How does the call automatically transfer to a local hospital in the area one lives in?
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I’m a 911 dispatcher and can answer this. The way 911 works, it routes your call to whatever center is in charge of the first cell tower your phone hits. Once that happens the 911 system keeps refreshing and working on pinging the next 2 closest towers to get a very accurate location (I’ve seen as close as on the physical building to about 50 meters away). Now it’s very common for that first tower that your phone hits to not be in the actual jurisdiction that you’re in, that’s where the triangulation comes in, you’ll then be transferred to the correct agency/center. Now with landlines this is different. Landlines are programmed to ring to the proper agency when they are set up. I hope this answer helps.
On top of the great answers, you would actually be amazed at the number of people who seem to think 911 is a nationally based thing. Like their call might be handled by someone in Wyoming or something if they live in Florida.
Get people who call all of the time and want to make sure I am familiar with the one major road that runs through the entire county. (I’m in a very rural place)
Here in Australia we have to tell emergency services our state and town plus the closest crossroad, we’ll from all my ambulance calling experience, ive had to anyway
So. My friends mom is a 911 operator.
Here’s how it works according to her.
Your house phone is attached to an area code. When you call that, it connects to the service that does call routing. It takes your area code and patches you to the nearest call center. 99% of the time it’s local. But, like during the riots last year, it was so busy, a small county had been answering calls and reporting it to our Police.
Now cell phones use two methods. The E911 service which bases it on cellular triangulation and GPS when available, followed by the attached area code.
The same method works except the having tracking tools to locate an active call.
Some 911 is a call center for all services, other times its for Police who then route the call to Fire or EMS.
They can systematically do this based on the PBX for landline or based on cell tower if its cellular.
there are settings associated with your phone number in your service providers switch that control where the call goes to when you dial 911
I’ll tell you a quick story: while living in Bryan, TX I had to call 911 multiple times and each time it went to the 911 center of college station, TX. Which was the city that was connected to Bryan, and each time they had to transfer me to the correct center. Which added almost a minute to the call because the “wires kept getting crossed”.
Going back to the old days of simple telephone systems, when you dial a number, your phone is connected to a local exchange. The exchange receives the numbers in the order they are dialled, and routes the call accordingly. In the NANP (North American Numbering Plan), a “normal” number is 7 digits, with the first group of three digits identifying the exchange and the second group of 4 identifying the individual line from that exchange. When the plan was created, it was felt that no local area would need 1000 local exchanges, so it was possible to reserve certain numbers that would never be allocated to normal exchanges for specific purposes.
555, for example, is generally dedicated for dramatic use. It is never allocated as a real number, so film and TV can use numbers starting 555 for fiction, and there will never be a real phone with that number. 0 was reserved for the operator and 1 was reserved for accessing long distance trunk dialling, so no exchange starts with a 0 or a 1. The numbers x11 were all reserved for specific purposes in the local area. For example 611 was used for reporting faults with the phone system. If a number in this range is dialled, the local exchange will route it, locally, to the relevant service. When it was decided to adopt a universal emergency number, 911 had not been allocated for any other purpose, so it was free for this use.
Back in the day, if you dialled 911, it would route you from your local phone exchange to the local emergency services operator, based on the exchange to which the phone you are calling from is connected. Obviously with cellular phones things are a little more complicated, but basically the same principal applies: if you dial 911 from a cell phone, it routes you to the emergency operator that is local to whichever cell phone tower your phone is connecting to.
911 on a cell phone now hits to the closest cell phone tower. Depending on where you are, it will hit with local police, your sheriff or your highway patrol.
But then it depends on how busy your area is. For example, if you’re calling 911 for a sideshow in a bigger city, most likely so will another 50 people. The first x amount of calls will go to the local police, cuz they’ll hit off those cell towers. But if all those lines are busy, cuz of too many callers, it’ll bounce till it finds an open line, and sometimes that’s with a different agency. When that happens we can usually transfer you over easy.
Thats why we say, if you already know someone’s calling, don’t call too thinking more calls means faster response. Just means your call is in the same line as another different emergency, and could be holding that person up.
One thing to add, the system isn’t foolproof. Sometimes a 911 center will get calls routed to it from across the country. Rare but not impossible
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